I'm Celebrating Double Nickels Plus a Penny and Another Year

When you’re young, your birthday means balloons and cake and friends coming over for a party and bringing you lots of presents. When you’re older, like my parents, they say they are just happy to be alive another day so that they can enjoy watching their grandchildren and great-grandchildren grow up and prosper.

Notice how the parents don’t mention their adult children. What’s fun about watching children in their fifties creep closer and closer to the age when they can collect Social Security too, assuming it will help them very much when they achieve that milestone in 5 or 10 years.

Nevertheless, I’ve had a very happy day for one who is celebrating one cent over the double nickels. On Thursday night, my husband and I made devil’s food chocolate cup cakes with butter cream frosting and green sprinkles. (Think trees.) I took them with me to New Quarter Park where I was scheduled to meet several Master Naturalist friends and NQP staff to do our bluebird boxes spring cleaning. We enjoyed hearing and seeing bluebirds staking out their territory. There was usually a bird sitting on each box as we approached with our barbecue brush to sweep out last year’s poop, dirt dauber nests, and assorted clusters of spider web, insect eggs, and cocoons. Sorry about that critters. These boxes are for the birds. We moved many of the boxes so they would get the afternoon shade: as you may remember, last year was a cooker. After two hours of cleaning, we stopped at the park office where my friends and the staff sang happy birthday while I passed around the cupcakes. Did I mention that it was 70 degrees yesterday? It was an absolutely bea-u-ti-ful day to be outside with friends. We spend another 2 hours at the park for a total of 4. I feel so fortunate to have been able to spend such a la-de-da day, given the troubled world that we live in. At age 56, your birthday is what you make it.

When I came home I didn’t want to go indoors, so puttered around the yard, dividing perennials and planting them in new places in my ever shrinking lawn. A lawn is the part of your yard where you grow grass. I am on a mission to eliminate my lawn. It was 5:00 before I remembered that I needed to count birds for the Great Backyard Bird Count, so I took a glass of wine, binoculars, and notepad out to the deck to record the twilight birds.

When my husband came in from his bike ride and had cleaned up, I was still out there in the dark. I told him that for my birthday I wanted to check out the World of Wine store in New Town and use that 20% off coupon they sent to me in the mail as a birthday present. In our house, Friday it pizza night, so I suggested we could have dinner in nearby zpizza. That’s what we did, and on the way we stopped in Chico’s where everything in the store was 15% off and he bought me a pink long-sleeved tee shirt. If you go to zpizza anytime soon, I highly recommend the Mediterranean Rustic. We ate on the patio and now I understand why people are complaining so much about the crowds of unruly teens in New Town’s village square. Yes, someone did call the police.

It was a very pleasant birthday all in all and the fun continues today. My husband let me sit on the deck and count birds for the Great Back Yard Bird Count while he vacuumed. It was warm, but too windy for all but the hungriest of birds to come to my feeder. Still I meditated on each one that I saw as he or she held on tight, cracked seeds, or just sunned. While looking through the binoculars into the trees I could see the tiny buds on oak, beech, redbud getting puffy and ready to let lose a leaf or bloom. I could look and watch for hours. It always makes me think about how far I’ve come from anthropomorphic visions. How can anyone who’s looked at the natural world and thought reasonably be so limited by fundamentalist dogma? Life is more than humanity and much too long, big, small, simple, complex, and awesome. I prefer to push my thoughts in the direction of wonder.

And the birthday goes on. Tonight, Ken and I are meeting Elizabeth, Daniel, Bryce, and Matthew at Hana Sushi at Gloucester Point. I love what the Daily Press reviewer said about this place: “Sushi in Hayes? … In this area of Gloucester County – where the Guinea watermen rule – raw fish is bait. [emphasis mine] The fish you eat has been battered, deep-fried and served with a baked potato and crock of butter and sour cream.”

Speaking of getting old, I’d like to recommend that you read Shock of Gray, by Ted C. Fishman. If you aren’t gray before reading this, you will be after. But it is very much worth the read and the raised awareness it delivers. Bottom line: medicine, nutrition, and civilization have improved our lives so much that we’re all going to live to be a hundred or very probably more. And it’s going to make the world pop as the old get older and the young get fewer. We’re going to live to be great-great grandparents a family structure enhancement that’s already common in Japan.

Well, Ken and Matthew are getting ready to take a bike ride. Matthew will celebrate 33 years on Sunday. I was going to go too, but with 40 mile per hour gusts, I think not. Time to curl up with another cheerful book: A Bridge at the End of the World by James Speth. It is the next book that my Sustainability Book Group will be discussing. I like to keep my life low key and wish it were so for others too, so that our species could celebrate a few more birthdays. But wishful thinking won’t make it so. On my birthday I’m reminded of a discussion at our last book group meeting had about when we thought the “Long Emergency” will begin. How old will we be in 2030 or 2050 or what will happen to our children and grandchildren when it will surely be so by 2100? The years roll by and we hunger to learn and know and to look longer and farther. What will the future hold?

Get outdoors and enjoy the advent of spring.

"They All Dead Now" and the End of Time

Today's high temperature is forecast to be 69 degrees. If you read all the way to the end of this post, it will make sense.

I've been into genealogy since writing my Mathews book and as any genealogist knows, it's like eating peanuts. You just can't stop. It's easier for me than for a lot of other genealogist, however, because so many generations of my family lived in the same place: Mathews County, Virginia. I've often looked at the names and details about the individuals in my extended paternal and maternal lines and wondered if they knew each other, fought side by side at the Battle of Gwynn's Island, went to the same church. Some were rich and some were poor.

Another thing they say about genealogy is that you better watch out about finding that skeleton in your closet. Yes, there are a few in mine. Although they were men of their times and I don't think they were necessarily evil, I feel sad and am sorry about their actions. Most of the skeletons in my closet have to do with my ancestors involvement in the slave trade and slavery, as slave owners and overseers.

Recently, a Foster family relative shared a book with me, We Lived in a Little Cabin in the Yard, edited by Belinda Hurmence (Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair, 1994). It included the following interview with a former slave who belonged to a distant cousin of mine. Shep Miller's great grandfather and my sixth-great grandfather are the same man, John Foster, born 1686.

Elizabeth Sparks

Interviewed at the courthouse in Mathews on January 13, 1937 by Claude J. Anderson

"My mistress's name was Miss Jennie Brown. She died about four years ago. Bless her. She was a good woman. 'Course I mean she'd slap and beat you once in a while, but she weren't no woman for fighting, fussing, and beating you all day, like some I know. 'Course no white folks perfect.

"Before Miss Jennie was married, she lived at her old home right up the river here. You can see the place from outside here.

"Her mother was a mean old thing. She'd beat you with a broom or a leather strap, or anything she'd get her hands on.

"She used to make my aunt Caroline knit all day, and when she get so tired after dark that she'd get sleepy, she'd make her stand up and knit. She work her so hard that she'd go to sleep standing up, and every time her head nod and her knees sag, the lady'd come down across her head with a switch.

"That was Miss Jennie's mother. She'd get the cook just so much meal to make bread from, and if she burnt it she be scared to death, because they'd whip her. I remember plenty of times the cook ask, say, "Massa, please excuse this bread: it's a little too brown." Yes sir! Beat the devil out her if she burn that bread.

"On the plantation my mother was a house woman. She had to wash white folks' clothes all day and hers after dark. Sometimes she'd be washing clothes way up around midnight. No sir, couldn't wash any nigger's clothes in daytime.

"Shep Miller was my master. Bought my mother, a little girl, when he was married. She was a real Christian and he respected her a little. Didn't beat her so much. 'Course he beat her once in a while. Beat women! Why, sure he beat women. Beat women just like men. Beat women naked and wash them down in brine.

"He was that way with them black folks. Shep Miller was terrible. Why, I remember time after he was dead when I'd peep in the closet and see his old clothes hanging there, and just fly. Yes sir, I'd run from them clothes; and I was just a little girl then. No, he ain't in heaven--went past heaven/

"Old Master done so much wrongness. I couldn't tell you all of it. Slave girl Betty Lilly always had good clothes and all the privileges. She was a favorite of his.

"Might as well quit looking at me. I ain't going to tell you any more. Can't tell you all I know--old Shep might come back and get me. Why, if I was to tell you the really bad things, some of them dead white folks would come right up out of their graves. But can't tell all! God's got all!

"Slaves went to bed when they didn't have anything to do. Most time they went to bed when they could. They worked six days from sun to sun. Usual work day began when the horn blow and stop when the horn blow. They get off just long enough to eat at noon. If they forcing wheat and other crops, they start to work long before day. Sometimes the men had to shuck corn till eleven and twelve o'clock at night.

"Didn't have much to eat. Well, they give the colored people an allowance every week. A woman with children would get about a half-bushel of meal a week; a childless woman would get about a peck and a half of meal a week. They get some suet and slice of bread for breakfast. For dinner they'd eat ashcake baked on blade of a hoe.

"The men on the road got one cotton shirt and jacket. If you was working they'd give you shoes. Children went barefooted the year around.

"Schools? Son, there weren't no schools for niggers. Niggers used to go way off in quarters and slip and have meetings. They called it "stealing the meeting." If you went out at night the pattyrollers would catch you, if you was out after time without a pass. If they catch them they beat them half to death. Most of the slaves was afraid to go out.

"Plenty of slaves ran away. Sometimes they beat them so bad they just couldn't stand it, and they run away to the woods. If you get in the woods they couldn't get you. You could hide and people slop you something to eat.

"They had colored foremen, but they always have a white overseer. After a while, he tell one of colored foremen, tell you come on back, he ain't going to beat you anymore. Foreman get you to come back and then he beat you to death again. That's the way the white folks, was. But you know, there's good and bad people everywhere. Some had hearts; some had gizzards instead of hearts.

"I lived in Seaford then and was around fifteen or sixteen when my mistress married. I remember just as well when they gave me to Jennie. We was all in a room helping her dress, and she turns around and says to us, "Which of you niggers you think I'm going to get when I get married?"

"We all say, "I don't know."

"And she looks right at me and point her finger at me like this and said, "You!"

"I was so glad. She was just a young thing. She didn't beat. 'Course she take a whack at me sometime, but that weren't nothing.

"I went with Miss Jennie and worked at house. I didn't have to cook. I slept in my mistress's room, but I ain't slept in any bed. No sir! I slept on a carpet, an old rug, before the fireplace.

"I had to get permission to go to church; everybody did. We could sit in the gallery in the white folks' service in the morning, and in the evening the folks held baptize service in the gallery with white present.

"I was about nineteen when I married. My husband lived on another plantation. I got permission to get married. You always had to get permission. White folks would give you away. You jump across a broomstick together, and you was married.

"I was married in 1861. My oldest boy was born in 1862, and the falling of Richmond came in 1865.

"Shep went to war, but not for long. We didn't see none of it, but the slaves knew what the war was about. The slaves wanted freedom, but they's scared to tell the white folks so. They sent some of the slaves to South Carolina when the Yankees came near, to keep the Yankees from getting them. Sent Cousin James to South Carolina.

"After the war they tried to fool the slaves about freedom, and wanted to keep them on a-working--white folks' heads was just going to keep on having slaves. But the Yankees told them they was free.

"I never will forget when the Yankees came through. They was taking all the livestock and all the men slaves back to Norfolk with them, to break up the system. What tickled me was my husband, John Sparks. He didn't want to leave me and go, because he didn't know where they was taking them nor what they was going to do, so he played lame to keep from going. He was just a-limping around. It was all I could do to keep from laughing.

"I can hear Miss Jennie now, yelling at them Yankees: "No! Who are you to judge? I'll be the judge. If John Sparks wants to stay here he'll stay."

"They was going to take him anyhow, and he went inside to pack, and the baby started crying. So one of them said that as long as he had a wife and a baby that young, they guessed he could stay.

"Anyway, the Yankees was giving everything to the slaves. I can hear them telling old Mistress now, "Yes! Give her clothes. Let her take anything she wants."

"They even took some of Miss Jennie's things and offered them to me. I didn't take them, though, because she'd been pretty nice to me. They took all the horses, cows, and pigs and chickens and anything they could use and left.

"When my mother's master died he called my mother and brother Major and got religion and talked so pretty. He say he so sorry that he hadn't found the Lord before and had nothing against his colored people. He was sorry and scared, but confessed.

"Now, you take that and go. Put that in the book. You can make out with that. It ain't no sense for you to know all about those mean white folks. They meant good, I reckon. They all dead now. Leastways, most of them got salvation on their death beds.

"The end of time is at hand, anyway. The Bible say when it gets so you can't tell one season from the other, the world's coming to end. Here it is, so warm in winter that it feels like summer."